


Hiatus

by bibliocratic



Category: I Am In Eskew (Podcast), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: AU, All Aboard the Bad Time Train, Body Horror, Eldritch Abominations Abound, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Surrealism, mental fuckery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22963801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: My name is Jonathan Sims, and I am in Eskew.(Jon gets lost in a Spiral city. It is not as easy as escaping.)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 42
Kudos: 101





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I got a prompt on Tumblr which excellently asked me to pick one of my favourite medias and write a JM AU with it. As ever, I have fulfilled the bare minimum of what was requested. I did however, have the brilliant excuse to listen to the whole run of Eskew again, so thanks for that :D

My flatmate is in the kitchen again when I wake up.

I lie there, shallow thin breathing as though my ribs wince to take up room. My dreams have been vague, billowing dark, and I don't get up for a long time, marinating in the sick, unhappy sensations they thread in me.

I look up at the tapestry of speckling damp that weaves and crawls in the corners and walls of my bedroom. My room shares a wall with the kitchen, and through the plasterboard, I can hear him banging about.

Every morning, this. The ceramic clank of mugs being brought out from the overhead cupboard, the one with the lopsided hinge, the one he _knows_ makes that horrible whinge; the rumble and train-track rattle of the kettle, the snap as it switches off; the slopping pour as the water's emptied into the mug; the yawn of pressure like an exposed wind tunnel as the tap is turned on to refill.

It is too early for this. That is what I shout out to him, punctuate my irritation with a percussion of petulant slamming on the wall in return. I don't use his name because I don't know it, but he clearly ignores me as he starts the clattering, disruptive cycle again.

Prick. He ignores me when I shout that too.

My curtain is open, letting the intrusion of the day get a head-start. They're building a great tower in the distance – the builders must work at night, scuttling shadow-shaped because I haven't heard the shout and machinery of a construction yard. The building is a hulking high-rise skeleton, the growths of it like the ridged notches of an x-rayed spine. It reaches upwards with greedy spindles, the points with the pattern of black tallow, melted and pliable. The reach of it unsettles me.

It's five cups later that my alarm for work goes off. I fumble to silence it before begrudgingly getting up, hissing as my arm shudders with pins and needles.

In the kitchen, as expected, a darkened room. The light from the fixtures don't improve this much when I flick them on. I've asked my landlord to fix this, maybe get some new bulbs or something, but I haven't seen him for a few weeks now. I can see his shadow in his flat, threshing about in the slit between door and carpet transition strip, but he won't answer my knocking. If I am persistent, I'm gifted a hissing, gargling response that clearly demands I come back at a more convenient time. I'd be surprised, but all landlords, in my experience, are equally inept.

There's five mugs of cold tea on the counter-top. Most of the liquid is spattered about like an oil spill, dribbling down to soak the cheap lino.

I refill the kettle from the sink tap. Mop up the spillage with a towel, tip the water in the mugs down the drain, fish out and dispose of the sodden useless bags of wet leaf.

I consider leaving a passive-aggressive note on the counter-top about the mess my flatmate leaves. I have tried this already, returned home to find the paper chewed, gnawed upon and kneaded by molars, balled up with spit and spat haughtily to the floor.

We have, it seems, a long way to go to establish communication.

I go and get ready for work. I am late again.  
  


* * *

  
My name is Jonathan Sims, and I am in Eskew.  
  


* * *

My boss asks for a meeting today. I'm expecting a dressing-down of some sort, some vapid request to play nicer with those who come to give oral statements or to show off – as though we're an antique dealers', not an academic institute – whatever junk they find in lofts and abandoned boxes and dead relatives' lock-ups that they think might be worth something. My manner, I am aware, can at times be a little short. This is not something I am intending on apologising for.

Yet her fat, over-rounded face is instead gleefully effusive, lit from the inside with a contented glow. She praises my work ethic over the past however long I've worked here, my diligence and fastidiousness and efficiency, how much of an asset I am to the company. Her mouth seems to over-enunciate the words, stretching wide, patronising, and I struggle not to glower.

You're making _real strides,_ Jonathan, she beams. She adds emphasis to odd words, and it gives her sentences a lopsided impression. You're certainly _fitting in_ here, why, we _can't_ imagine the workplace without you.

She references Tom, who is apparently an area director overlooking some part of our institute, and Marlene, whose job is somehow different in a notable way that I have not yet worked out.

And I was _just saying_ to Tom the other day, she continues, eyes over-bright, you've really turned those _archives_ around, _a real go-getter, Our Jonathan_ he said to me. And Marlene said the same thing, _Our Jonathan,_ she said, he does wonders in those _archives, how_ well he's doing, we're _so pleased_ with him.

I do not like being someone's Jonathan.

“I'm glad to be of help,” I reply with the awkward idea that I'm meant to respond with a gratitude for this praise. I have never spoken to my boss before today. I spend a lot of time cataloguing papers and artefacts from Old Eskew, statements of local history and interest, working long hours and alone. “For as long as I'm here.”

My boss smiles.

“I can't _ever_ think of _why_ you'd want to leave,” she replies. “Why, this place is perfect for you. _Just where you're made to be._ ”

The corners of her mouth stretch up like spires. I excuse myself to return to my dusty sanctuary.  
  


* * *

Eskew is like the London of my hoarded memory, the keepsakes I keep selfishly guarded. It's been a long time, since I was last in the British capital. I get homesick a lot. That said, Eskew, for anyone who is brave enough to inter-rail through here, to be a tourist in such a secluded cut off corner of Europe, has a lot to offer.

I will not be staying long though. I know this for certain.

Eskew is a warped sandwiching of times and histories all bludgeoned bloody together to make the pieces almost fit. A brutalist museum forced up chummy against the remnants of a faux-Georgian terrace, that's in itself an affected facade made by people who want to pretend things are what they're not. Oldtown has the foot-worn cobbled areas that a number of European cities mimic, and it winds corkscrew-like to rub virulent as ivy-rash against the flesh of the newer cosmopolitan shopping areas.

The rain here is battering, windless and tepid, and whenever I leave the house, it's moments before my socks surrenders and slick sodden in my shoes.

The maps don't work. Not the brightly garish tourist maps they hand out at the information office, with little squat cartoon figures in Eskovian traditional dress, jabbing fat fingers at the landmarks of interest. The Crying Duchess holds a sodden handkerchief to the ruins of the cathedral, Happy Jack Adams clenches his shape in a many-legged mould around the Park, strangling the Old Man of Green Hedgerows.

Even the broadly reliable map applications on my phone stopped working soon after I arrived. This could easily be the shoddy work of some poorly paid cartographer, or some glitch in a monolithic system of binary and number and coded data. Maybe.

It was ever so easily to get lost here. I know that much.  
  


* * *

There's a yellow door, starting to appear around the city. At first I thought it was an Eskew thing, some decoration for a local festival or tradition, like the strings of pearling beads for Autumn festivals, or the tarred and feathered cloaks and horrendous masks they deck themselves in for some pre-Christian Carnival parade.

When I look closely, it's always the same door. Yellow, the wood warped, the handle curved like a spiral.

I see it at work, mimicking the dimensions of the staff room door; in the cafe around the corner from my flat; dug into the cobbles like a manhole cover when I take a short cut back. I watch a man mistake it for the toilets at the cinema, and he does not come back out.

The door strains and struggles to keep its foothold in the spaces it takes up, and it does not seem to be able to stay long. I don't try my chances at opening it. I don't ask anyone else if they see it because I don't want confirmation that it's only me.

I've learned that here, it's better to pretend such things aren't happening. Then they might leave you alone.  
  


* * *

It's raining, and it's not Thursday yet so there's a scraping, gnawing hunger at the floor of my stomach that I'm trying to ignore. Work appeases the sensation somewhat, listening to people drone on about their fragile, ill-recollected histories, reading personal, conflicting accounts of the building and founding and settling of this city, but they serve as a distraction only. I am not surprised, only disappointed. I am always so hungry, it seems.

I decide to forgo the temptation to linger in my flat, listening to the skitter and jive of something making a playground of the cladding in my walls, my flatmate who has started having rowdy one-man parties in the kitchen, his hideous whooping and hollering and snarling that keeps me up at night. I have asked my landlord to do something about this, but when he had located eyes by which to look at me, they had pinballed dizzily in their sockets like a demagnetised compass, and I couldn't focus enough to stress the issue. I think it unlikely anything will get done.

I go out to the pub. It's called the Headless Marchioness, though I wouldn't be able to tell you which of Eskew's monarchy has the pleasure to be its namesake; I do not have the head for histories these days. There's another ex-pat in tonight. I can hear his accent, British, Southern even, as he orders, and these geographical call-outs rock loose a homesickness in me. I can speak passably enough in Eskovian, though I get my tenses confused at times, but I don't feel up to emulating the carrion and shrill bird-croak of it tonight.

I want talk of home. Of weathered streets and old shores that I've left.

I tread over to the man's table, and ask if I can sit down. His glasses are smudged, dirty, and they cloak flat, commonplace eyes that putter with a flash-bang spark of interest that douses quickly out.

He nods, and waves his hand in a sort of 'it's a free country' sort of way. He glances over my shoulder, and then sharply away with a wood-louse curl of his body. He does not look that way again and I politely don't mention it. As a rule of thumb, it's best not too.

My door is back. I wonder if he can see it. Leaning next to the flapping mouth of the kitchen door, copying its dimensions. Its yellow sticks out amongst the drab browns of this room.

“Not from round here then?” he asks after a strung-out minute in which we both ransack our mouths for something to say.

I'm a bit offended, because it's not an inconsiderable length of time I've lived here, and I don't have an appearance that satisfies any ability to be unobtrusive. I am known by most I meet very quickly – I prefer to think that it is my foreignness in this city that makes me stick out, rather than my dramatic appearance. Jonathan is, after all, an unusual name, non-existant in Eskovian, and people regularly repeat my name back to me, like they're chewing the sound in their mouth. My job too, draws interest. 'Hello, Jonathan-the-Archivist,' I am greeted by shop assistants, and work colleagues, even people I am sure I've never met before. It used to make me very uneasy, to be so noticeable in such a close-knit, stifling city.

But I don't fault the man for the error. I am tired and I am hungry and my flat is full of tenants I haven't invited, so I settle for shrugging. Maybe I should take this anonymity as respite.

“Originally London,” I reply instead to keep the peace. “Well, really Bournemouth. Lived in London for a long time.”

“The rat race not agree with you?” he asks humourless, and I shrug and take a sip, because that must have been the reason.

"I'm not planning on staying long,” I respond, and it feels important to say that out loud.

He gives me a disbelieving look, but doesn't follow it up, and I feel like he's with-holding a punchline. I want to ask him, really Ask him, but I won't. I told myself I'd stop all that, when I came here.

The man's name is David. He has jittery limbs that shift restless, unbrushed hair that he pushes back from his forehead as a nervous tic. He buys me a pint and we drink unhappily. The words snaggled up, spooling out uncomfortably, our conversation bumpy and regularly stalling. He is looking at me and thinking of something else. I am trying not to think of how hungry I am.

When he stands wobbly to leave, palm flat on the table to keep balance, he tells me how sorry he is without meeting my eyes.  
  


* * *

It's Thursday, so like unrelenting clockwork, a woman comes up to me as I'm getting the overground metro home. It's not always a woman, but these people I'm sent, they've all got the same grey-shocked expression on their faces, glancing askance at me before sitting down. Faces drawn, pinched. Like they don't sleep very well.

She sits down heavily in the scuffed seat next to me, a wet greatcoat slopping like meat at the motion, little puddles as though dripping candle wax on the grey pocked floor of the train car.

The other people in the car stand and leave like there's a stop approaching, form an orderly queue and traverse from one carriage to another. There isn't a stop. There won't be one till this is over. I've cycled around this bend enough by now. I tried, in the early days, to change my methods of transport – walking, taking the bus, the train, a taxi – but it doesn't make any difference.

The woman stares at my hand, gripping the rain-ruined leather of my briefcase, and I'm obviously put out at the forwardness of it. I feel the waspish words of dismissal in my mouth, but my stomach clenches like a sickening, like taking a handful of skin and _twisting,_ and I meekly submit to what will come. Because I am so hungry. Because it is easier to accept this now, this offering of the only meal my body cherishes.

I don't think I was always like this.

She gestures to her own hand then. Settled next to mine, like she's about to take hold. Her skin is white and pallid but mottled in patches, browned off with a reddish rust like discoloured chalk. Her fingertips are shorter than expected, stumped like half a knuckle has simply not grown on any finger. Her nails absent, the sides of her palms misshapen like it's losing shape, its structural integrity, and caving in.

'What happened to yours,' she asks me. There's no harm in telling her the truth, so I reply that I can't remember. A childhood accident maybe, a careless error, some injury I invited upon myself. The more time I spend in this city, the more things are harder to recall. I remember it hurt more than I expected it to. That it burned, and I screamed, that the sound melted into my lungs and someone laughed.

She nods. She gives me a sad look, and says she's sorry, and she means it.

And then her face goes slack. Eyes blank. She opens her mouth like a cue has been given. In amongst the rows of teeth like residential streets, a wet flapping tongue poorly gestures the mechanisms of speech.

She weaves a horrible tale of rust taking tenancy in the bulkheads of some great steamship that docked and unloaded its gift to mainland. A corrosion coating the hulls of ships like pebbledash, licking up the grain of her hand as she worked to chisel it off, thinking it barnacle in nature. She tells me how it overcomes skin and bone, slowly creepingly devours the flesh of her, and I am enraptured.

Afterwards, I stagger off the carriage at the next stop, leaving the unblinking, rust-bitten woman to her final coming days. I feel sick. Like I've eaten too much, too heavily.

I go straight to bed, holding my stomach, rubbing it to try and assuage the sensation of being over-full. I cloak the covers pall-fashioned over my head.

My flatmate is oddly silent tonight, and I entertain the vindictive thought that my door might have eaten him.  
  


* * *

I've been thinking. It's a habit that serves me poorly here. I should really keep my head down, just accept and close my eyes and hope to be left alone.

But I keep seeing the yellow door. And the more I see it, the more I'm convinced that it's not a visitation from the city. The space around it always seems to crack and pucker, like it's an intrusion, poorly healed scar tissue. I wonder if it leads out of here. If it's the exit I've been looking for.

If I can go home.

I'm drinking in the pub. David's bought a round. We are talking about things that are deliberately not the things we want to talk about. David doesn't like it when I talk about the city. He wants to know, in his own curious way, but he wants to be accepted more, wants to be loved by it without being hurt. It's a parasitical desire, to be wanted by something, to be understood by something. A ruinous urge programmed from birth, and it eats him from the inside, his whole body bruised from the violent need of it.

He's not hungry to know. Not like me.

Christ, but I'm always so hungry.

The yellow door is lingering by the bar hatch, and the staff keep walking right past it. It's boxy, has too little weight behind it; it's like, I think to myself, a reproduction of a door, like those knock-off Rembrandts and Monets. There's a handle that curves like horns, like a Fibonacci spiral, two hinges and a pretence of a lock. But it's not a door.

If I push down the handle, I think it will go somewhere. I think it wants me to.

I can hear the rain through the double glazing of the window hammer down louder.

“Can you see the door?” I ask David. I don't warn him. He'd back out otherwise. Make excuses to finish the conversation, ducking back out into the rain, high-shouldered, anxious and frosty when we next talk.

He pauses. Looks over at it. Worries his lower lip.

“I can see a door,” he says cautiously, without committing. That will have to be enough.

“I think it's a way out. A way out of Eskew.”

I hold up a hand, my burned one, the violence upon my body I can't remember being enacted. I have scars, pock-marked over my face, down my neck and upper chest, and I don't know what happened there either. A serrated rip over my throat, a jagged twisting coil of tissue at my shoulder. And I need to. I need to know what's happening. What this place is. How I can get home.

I gesture to silence his protests, for already he's motioning to abort the conversation, urgent and feverish and bulging-eyes fearful.

“Do you remember coming here?” I ask.

He squirms, discomforted and does not answer.

“Sometimes I think I came for work,” I tell him. “A research assignment that's dragged on, some company decision to chase something nasty on foreign shores. My job, I think maybe I did something like that before. I've made notes about Eskew, carefully worded reports to back home, but I've never sent them, and I don't remember writing them. A-and then, yeah, I've got a diary, in my bedside draw. It's in my handwriting, so _surely_ it's my record _,_ and apparently, according to what I wrote, I wanted a new start. I wanted to run away, from everything, everything was _too_ much back home, and Eskew seemed to be the perfect place to hide from it all. Apparently I wanted to come here. ”

I lean in. David leans back. His bruised knuckled are tightening on his drink. “I've never kept a diary. I don't know... If I worked for someone, why would they send me here? Why did I want to run away so badly? But that's the point, isn't it David? You know what this place is, what this city does. It'll say whatever it wants to make it seem realistic. It wants me happy, in its own way, doesn't it? It'll give me a home and a job, and it'll _feed_ me,” my mouth rucks up in distasteful unhappiness, “but I don't want that. I want to go _home._ ”

“Jon,” David says, and he looks upset, haggard and aged with exhaustion, his eyes teary. “Jon, don't talk like this.”

“I'm right, aren't I?”

“I...”

“If I go through that door, I might be able to....”

“It won't matter.”

“Not to you,” I snap testily, and the sour bite of my scalding temper is an old flavour I thought I didn't have in me any more. “You might not have anyone to get back to, but there's.... I have people. I – I know I have. I've people to go back to.”

Their names are tucked under my tongue and I can't dredge them out into sound.

The yellow door has retreated again. But I could look for it. If I search, if I'm patient, if I wait, then the next time, nothing can stop me.

I know I have something to return for. I – I'm sure I have. I must do.

David's hand lands at my wrist. He's bird-boned, drained, but he grabs onto my shirt-sleeve insistently.

“It won't matter,” he mutters feverish, whispered, as though he doesn't want to be overheard. “It'll find a way eventually. To make you stay.”

I pull my arm back. Disgusted by his cowardice, frightened by his sincerity. I stand too fast, the screech of my chair legs harsh and unyielding, grab my still-damp coat.

“I'll see you later in the week,” David says softly. Not vindictively. Almost sadly on my behalf.

I walk out into the rain without a goodbye.

* * *

The alarm goes off, and there's a grunt, and a 'Jesus, Jon, turn it off, it's _Saturday_ ', and I flail my arms sluggishly to silence it.

I'm not even sure it is a Saturday, but I'm treated to a hum of gratitude, an arm thrown around me like a cast net, dragging me into the furnace-heat of a warm body that rumbles a 'better' near my ear. I raise my hand to clamp around the thick, black-haired arm, and I am too rumpled by dark-cast dreams, don't know why I'm so surprised, why these motions feel unfamiliar.

I look around, angle my neck painfully, and I see corkscrew hair the colour of tarmac, a scattering of freckles like spilled coal dust, a face mushed into the skin of my back. His hands are around me, anchoring, and I'd forgotten how gentle they were.

I say his name. Soft. Confused and not sure why.

“Hmm?” he responses, half lost to the dozy morning, and he presses a lazy, dry kiss against my temple.

I say his name again, and feel it tangle in my mouth. I repeat it again, and to my horror, I feel tears dribbling down my face, and I don't know why, why I thought he wouldn't be here.

“Hey,” he mumbles, voice sleep-scratched, and he shifts to draw me closer, and I turn around to be enveloped by the heat-muggy hold behind me, getting tears onto his chest as my whole body hitches in a shattering I've strived so hard to stave off. “Hey, sweetheart, it's... it's ok, it's ok, come on, Jon, it's alright. Did you have a... did you have a bad dream?”

I nod, even though I don't know if that's true. He rocks me in his arms, and I allow myself this selfish breakdown, to be held by hands that for once are kind, to be spoken to in words I can understand, with a voice I feel like I haven't heard for a very long time. I don't ask any questions, not now, not here, I don't question any of this because I don't want to know the answers.

The yellow door waits expectantly at my bedside, and I ignore it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone thinking of getting into Eskew, Episode 1 and 2 are pretty good overall introductions to tone and content. Content warnings are available on the website under the 'episode' tab. As for episodes that are just really good and do something fun with the format, I personally really like Product (Episode 11), Embroidery (Episode 13), and Tenancy (Episode 16). 
> 
> This AU draws heavily on themes that run throughout the show, but particularly Ingratitude (Episode 22). I really wanted to do a JM version of 'Embroidery' but Christ that would have been so so grim. 
> 
> As a heads up – I am in Eskew is excellent, and well-written, and I regularly find even months after listening that I'll think about it, the concepts it raises, the characters it presents, and especially the finale. However, it is horror, in a different vein than TMA, and the subject matter is often much more uncomfortable for some listeners. I'll be putting content and trigger warnings for this fic in the end notes, especially for the second part.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eskew gets its claws in. Jon asks the questions he needs to and the questions he shouldn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woohoo boy. Please be aware there are content warnings aplenty, mostly for this chapter, some for chapter three. See the below notes for more details - I haven't upped the content rating, but this one does lean harder into some of Eskew's more horrific episodes. 
> 
> Mild spoilers for Eskew, but kept deliberately vague.
> 
> Because of length, I've cut chapter two into part 2 and 3. Part three up soon.

David's late to the pub tonight. Trapped at home with his scrambling, terrible-eyed children, time he couldn't cry off to go play happy families while his wife does something with the town planning committee. I don't have to wait alone; I have a drink with Martin, who arrived a little later than me, having to stay a bit later at work. He arrives, a hovering shadow the width of the doorway, his coat glossy with water, shaking the rain out of his bent-limbed umbrella, his dark hair. He casts me a soft smile like light thrown from a streetlamp as usual when he sees me.

He gestures at my empty glass, then the bar – _drink? –_ and feeling bold for a weekday, I nod. I catch him studying me as he waits in the minor queue when he thinks I'm not looking, a careful look as though considering a precious and protected thing. I glow with his attention, his love not yet grown familiar to me, untarnished with expectancy.

I try and be subtle about this, but I do not take my failure too harshly.

When David arrives, he looks pale and harried, like he's perpetually late for something he can't remember. He pauses though, uncertain as he sees I'm not alone at the table, like he's worried he's interrupting.

I motion with a tipsy grandeur – I have now had three ciders and I do not hold them as well as I did in my youth. You remember Martin!, I tell him, and Martin gives a cheery wave, and David stares, and something twitches in his fingers like a grave-shiver before he mumbles, yeah, yeah I remember, course. Good to see you Martin.

He's tense and uncomfortable when he sits down, peels his coat from his body, half-downs the pint I move in front of him. I think he's having some troubles at home.

David talks stiltedly about his job when I prompt. He did something in publishing, though the memory of that conversation is damp and mired in obscurity; I guess he's between jobs, or looking around – every time we talk he seems to be doing something different.

He finishes the draft beer I bought quickly, and stumbles up to buy something else. He gets a bottled beer, and he fiddles with the paper, slicking the condensation down in rivulets with his fingers. When that stops being entertaining, he picks at the paper around the outside. He keeps flashing glances at Martin, little wrought ones that dart with the anxious fretting motion of a scattering insect. His eyes, moving: Martin, to me, to our posture – our sides touching, Martin bringing his chair round closer to my side – to where Martin's hand is resting on my knee under the table.

Pick, pick, pick.

“How about you?” he asks me suddenly, briskly and his smudged glasses turn to me with jumpy intensity. “How's work?”

“Same as usual,” I say, confused at his manner, but happy to be allowed the spotlight to gripe about the minor grievances that govern my day; the things misplaced, the instructions misconstrued or followed by incompetents, the unreasonable will of management.

“Remind me,” he says, interrupting, his gaze over-intense, blinkered to focus on only me, “What is it you do again?”

Martin sits close enough to press our knees together. He is a warm edifice by my side. He rubs his hand on my thigh absent-mindedly.

“You work at the library with me,” he says, lightly, proudly. “Don't you Jon? He's ever such a good asset.”

“And how long have you been doing that?”

I don't have the answer ready. It occurs to me that I'm not exactly sure – long enough, it feels like.

Martin's memory is better than mine. “Must be coming up on, what... two, three years, right? That anniversary thing wasn't too long ago.”

I remember now, of course. Three years. It was a small gathering of archival staff, librarians, research assistants whose names for me run together as distinct as sand grains – they had signed a card to me, with blocky scrawls of congratulations. 'Congratulations, our Jonathan,' they croaked from echoing throats, unblinking at me, and I'd thanked them and said all the right words, 'you shouldn't have', and 'how thoughtful of you', and accepted the squat slice of cake I was given. Martin had winked at me from across the table, and we'd left early, bought takeaway. Martin drunk too much and kissed me like a teenager when I tried to get him out of his clothes and into bed, stinking of sweet apples, burbling nonsense expressions of affection as I tugged off his shirt, his socks.

“When did you two meet?” David asks me, just as shortly, as though he didn't listen to the last answer.

“Years ago now,” Martin replies, looking over at me with a shy sort of bubbling smile. “I was in the research department, wasn't I, then I got reassigned to the archives. Wasn't exactly love at first sight, but we got there.”

He nudges me with his elbow good-naturedly, and I flush to remember, and mumble something about getting there eventually.

“And when...” David starts, but Martin interrupts.

He smiles and shakes his shaggy, overgrowing tarmac-coloured hair, and says, “You're not usually so chatty! Full of questions tonight, aren't you David?”

His smile is wide and friendly, mildly teasing.

David averts his eyes quickly, cringing. Like he's been slapped.

“Meant no harm,” he mumbles, and goes back to his bottle.

Pick, pick, pick.

Martin holds my hand ever so secure in his grip. Like something treasured, something beloved.  
  


* * *

For a long time, I think I am happy. No, that's wrong, because surely, I know I am. Because my happiness in this city, my foolish homesickness, my urge to bolt, turned out to be circumstantial, reliant on Martin being here. I am enfolded by his presence – I had forgotten the height of him, how broad he stands, how much space he takes up in my life, and I move over so happily to share.

For a long time, Eskew is not the place I misjudged it to be. I can ignore the puppet-limbed figures that beg, clattering their marionette arms for coins on Lower Street, their single note chant like air wheezing from an organ pipe; I can ignore the malicious geography of an unsettled, unsettling city, the hours I lose trying to get from the old Cathedral to the bottom of Oldtown; my ill-defined job, the papers and records and statements I must organise, the amount of which does not seem to shrink or grow in size; the skitter in my walls that may or may not be my old flatmate; my useless eye-less landlord; the endless unforgiving rain.

All of this is bearable because I am not alone.

My misgivings can only sit quashed for so long. It is a personal failing of mine. I think I was born to feel dissatisfied, a selfish ore running through the rock of me.

I always ruin things by asking too much of them.  
  


* * *

My door remains insistent.

Always the same. Yellow, worn, rain-splashed. A handle like a facsimile of a handle, like it's been painted on. The dazed coil of the wood.

And I cannot stop imagining that this might be a way out.

I tell Martin this. Because of course I do, because he is my partner, and I love him, and wherever I go, I want him to come with me.

Martin doesn't like it when I mention the door. His face scrunches up with a worry, and he points out the dangers: _you don't know where it goes Jon, why is it following you like that, it gives me the creeps._ And then when I push, he must take it as a questioning of our happiness somehow, because his mood sours, becomes petty and irritable and short, waving his hands dismissive, flippant in the way he does when he doesn't want a confrontation.

He goes to bed early without waiting for me, and I cannot help feel that the room is weighed down by the argument we should have had.

I am proud at first, indignant that I should be the one to back down, but this righteousness loses its integrity as quickly as paper in rain, and I am instead left bereft and lonely and guilty. Padding cautious into our bedroom, I try and apologise, but the words don't come out right. He sets his jaw and tries not to get teary-eyed, the way he does whenever conflict strikes, and he keeps asking miserably, plaintively, am I not happy here? Aren't we good? Aren't we doing well? And I rush to tell him this is perfect, that I am happy, that he makes me so, but that there's something in this city, _Martin, can't you sense it, there's something in this city, haven't you noticed?_

And Martin replies that there's nothing, _what could there possibly be Jon, I don't, love, I don't understand – you're being, look, I didn't want to bring it up because you had your reasons, but you know how you can get, nothing's out to get you, can you not just be happy for once? Allow yourself that, please, be happy, with just me._

I feel myself growing frustrated again, hackles raising into spikes at the accusation, and we're both digging in our heels.

“We could go back to London, Martin, we could go home!” I tell him, needing him on my side in this, hurt that he isn't.

He looks sucker-punched and replies with a voice trying not to waver: “I thought this was our home.”

I feel like a traitor for wanting more.

“Promise me,” Martin says finally, eyes damp and reddened, fidgeting with his fingernails. I want to sit on the bed, I want that closeness back, I want to not need to know so badly it leaves me cold. “Please, Jon, promise me that you won't go through the door. Not – not yet. If there's something, then I'll come, course I will. But please, I don't trust it. Promise me you won't try and leave. That you won't leave me.”

I promise, fervent, beseechingly, aching at the furrows the oath digs in my chest.

Of course I promise him this.

* * *

I want to prove a theory. I ask a number of people at work about holidays. I have never tried to strike up conversation with them outside of office matters before, but they take to my intrusion as though I'm a regular to their huddled smoking circles of chatter, and I pose my question easily enough under the guise of wanting to take Martin somewhere nice for his birthday.

Their answers illuminate nothing. The countries they describe are strange, bordering no geography I know, faceted like diamonds and frightening, and I wonder if the translation is the issue here, as I don't recognise the name of any of the countries even when I try them out in English. One talks about a sea without water, drought-cracked land rolled out like an empty warehouse floor – I ask if it's a desert, but no, they're insistent that it's a sea, and another pipes up that she'd thought about taking the missus there one holiday, that the prices are relatively inexpensive this time of year. I ask for more budget-offerings, and they tell me about quasi-European cities I've never heard of, with canals and flower markets and shopping districts and they are describing Eskew, always exactly Eskew as though there are no other cities anywhere.

On a day that could be a Tuesday, I tell Martin I want to get some things done from home, press the brown-bread sandwiches I've made into his hands and kiss him hard and guiltily before he goes.

It's not leaving, not really. It's proving that it's possible, certainly. But I'm coming back.

I head to the train-station. I buy a ticket from a woman with eyebrows thick as beer-bottle caps and a slack drooling mouth, and get on the first train that docks at the platform. I find a seat with ease. I brought no luggage, so I faff about on my phone, and don't start to relax until the train lurches and groans and finally departs the station, heading east.

I have a steadily replacing cast of patrons who share my carriage. Beleaguered father with pram, baby grizzling, hard-pressed woman with laptop who fiddles with a charm bracelet as she thinks, a frizzy-haired boy with games console who kicks the back of my seat thoughtlessly with the regularity of a metronome.

They get off at intervals, the stations bearing signs unfamiliar to me. The landscape outside the dirt-scuffed window alters its configurations of fields and hedgerows, crop-land half harvested and grazing cattle. In the distance, there are the promises of far-off forests. I'm on the train for one hour, then two. Off they get, then on. Beleaguered father with pram, baby grizzling. Hard-pressed woman with laptop who fiddles with a charm bracelet as she thinks. A frizzy-haired boy with games console who kicks the back of my seat thoughtlessly with the regularity of a metronome.

I get off after four hours, thinking surely that is far enough, and the stop is Eskew station.

I walk home, feeling vaguely ashamed, like I've embarrassed myself by trying at all. I spend the rest of the day stewing in the flat, pinballing from living room to bedroom to kitchen, unable to focus.

Five o'clock, and Martin doesn't come home.

I wait up all night. The dinner I've made out of guilt burnt on the hob. I get static instead of a dial tone when I try calling and I am frantic, what if he's hurt, what if he's sick, if he's running late why wouldn't he have called; I want to call his friends, but I don't know their numbers, his friends are all my friends and none of them answer.

I cannot shake the feeling this is a punishment of sorts for my transgression.

I wait up all day. Venture out into the tidal wash of rain, but when I get to work, the doors are closed.

Everywhere is closed. Every bakery and bar and pub and betting shop, every shop hawking tourist-tat, every office, gallery and macabre museum, their doors blackened and bolted. The streets and squares and public parks populated by the sound of the smashing rain.

I walk down every street looking for him. I don't see the marionette-armed beggars, no squash-necked passenger on the metro line with its Punch-and-Judy face, rotating its throat to glare mouthless at me, and the rain brings with it a fog that obscures even the crooked grasp of the distant tower. I don't see anyone at all.

I collapse sometime around dawn. Tear-streaked and wrecked with guilt, knowing the city took him from me.

“I didn't mean it,” I mumble exhausted, body folded over like a supplicant against the paving stones, my words tripping over themselves to make a pitiful slurry of petition. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

I don't know how I get back to the flat. But I wake up and Martin is coiled heavy and hot around me, snoring like the in-and-out of bellows in his sleep. I rouse him with my long-limbed flailing to grasp at him, feverish and deranged with relief, “are you hurt, Christ, Martin what did it do to you?” and Martin flutters confused eyes open, and tries to pin my arm – “Jon, Jon, I don't – Jon, I'm fine, Jon calm down, I'm ok.”

It takes him a long time to calm me down.

He has a scar like a porcelain crack, right over the back of his hand. Ugly and knotted over the ridged of knuckles, the byways of veins, like the skin was ripped up, healed poorly. He did not have it before, I _know_ he didn't, even if he tells me it's years old, a bicycle accident, 'I'm sure I told you the story before, didn't I? It's nothing, really. An old mistake.'

It is not the first time I make the mistake of questioning what I shouldn't. It is not the last time they take him from me. Send him back with a tally chart of my misdemeanours.

I keep making mistakes I didn't know were there to be made. Lines crossed I hadn't seen drawn, and I keep putting a foot wrong when the ground beneath me was not to be trusted to begin with.

I am, and have always been, a slow learner.

* * *

“How long have I been here?” I ask David quietly. I've smiled persuasively and pressed a dry kiss to a stubbled cheek and coaxed Martin into getting the next round – and he's taken his eyes off me, the kind, unblinking, staring beads of his eyes, in order to pay. I've lowered my voice, my body bent like the ceiling of some sepulchre, trying to trap the sound inside my own space. “From your point of view, I mean.”

“Shush,” David says, staring resolutely at his pint. “Keep your voice down.”

He looks tired, but then he always looks tired. His hands have picked up a pattern of quivering that makes rippling waves into his drink.

I think he's having trouble with his therapist again.

“How long have you been here then?” I ask, slightly more insistently, the ring of something weighted in the wording of it, of something growing snagging barbs under my tongue, and David's body spasms like a trapped nerve.

“Shut up,” he hisses, a scratching voice scrabbling for calm. “Shut up, Jon, for god's sake. It doesn't like it when you ask, you shouldn't... just shut up.”

Martin comes back with the drinks, settles next to me, his hand on my thigh, like an anchor, like a leg iron, like a ball and chain, and we don't broach the subject again.

* * *

  
I am coming home from work. Thursday. My head full of some dreadful spidering horror of bone and web, my treacherous stomach comfortable like I've sat with a good meal, and then up ahead, the yellow door is there again. Along the residential street where I live, it has stolen the door of number thirteen, number fifteen, number seventeen, all the way up, and the doors in their lintels quake and tremble with the effort of existing.

Behind the door, there's a shadow. In the distorted glass of the small window, an outline of shade, the promise of something tall, wire-haired, moves closer, looming. I jump, clutching my briefcase to my chest, making the shirt fabric stain damp, when the handle of number thirteen starts rattling. A violent quiver that breaks the wail of the rain, like someone trying to escape a locked room.

I shout aloud, start back when there's a bang. A full body weight thrown against the door, the hinges howling – bang, bang, bang. The figure enshrouded in gloom behind the glass, receding and returning like a determined tide – bang, bang, bang.

Number thirteen goes quiet.

I stand in the aftermath of this cacophony and breathe hard, muscles wound up painful.

Number fifteen begins.

_Bang, bang, bang._

The shadow is now behind the door of number fifteen. Frenzied, their shape held awkwardly; barrelling once against the unmoving door, making the glass clatter in its pane, before it moves on to number seventeen, number nineteen. It is moving away from me.

I follow.

Soon I am chasing after it. The banging sound just a little further ahead, like someone is running down a hotel corridor wildly, banging their fist against every door along the line, and I swear, god, I swear over the rain I hear muffled shouting, hollering hoarse and heartbroken, and I think it's my name, and suddenly it's the most important thing in the world that I open that door, that I go through, that I reply to that shouting, desperate clarion call to return, to go _home._

My trousers soak with puddle-water, my socks soaked inside my shoes, bag crashing against my upper leg. The hood of my coat has fallen back, and my hair is beginning to string and stick against my forehead, and the banging is moving too fast for me to keep up with the soles of my shoes slipping, my legs ungainly, my lungs breathing in fierce hard gasps.

I think I am shouting for it to slow down. I think I am pleading. I think I am crying.

I lose it finally in Oldtown. The world swells with the thundering, drenching rainfall, and all the doors are as doors should be. Red and brown and wood and plastic, windowed and windowless and none of them yellow.

I make an enraged, hysterical yell, but the weather front swallows it.

I am lost now. I have taken a turning where a road of bricked-up homes arch like claws into a cul-de-sac, but there were other arteries of roads forking out and I must have taken the wrong one. The street signs are repeating, maliciously contradictory, the information nonsensical. The houses tower like broken backed trees, street-lamps warping like the twisted strings of puppets.

I try and shelter in a doorway but the rain trickles down the gap between the back of my neck and my jacket.

Martin isn't answering my calls.

Over the rain, footfall. A infuriated stomping, feet slapping with the sharp rhythm of a clap on the damp cobbles. A man is coming closer, and there is something wrong in the way he is formed, the way he is staring at me so intensely, as though it is me he has come out into the rain to find.

I do run. Some memory of flight bolsters my legs to reignite their motions, but my shoes are wet, their flat tread gripless, and he is fast, and terror makes me sluggish.

I slip on the cobbles, my hand jarring as I try to break my fall, my knees scuffing and beading blood.

The man drags me up by my coat as if I have no density, no heft to keep my body tethered groundward. My back pushed hard against the rough brick wall behind me, his arm against my throat tight enough that I am pinned, panting and squirming, babbling some excuses, some wincing apologises that I haven't done better, that I keep not doing better. I attempt to scratch at his hold, move his hand away, and his flesh compacts under my nails like grouting.

He is an approximate man, something wearing a sloughed-skinned semblance of one. He keeps losing the way of his face and it hangs like drying linen over his skulls. His eyes are pitted, big and round in his face, the colour of cathedral spires, of tarmac glazed in an over-hot summer heat.

He starts intoning his statement even as I struggle and claw to free myself. His voice catching the stresses wrong, a drone that refuses to deviate in pitch or tone or volume.

He tells me a story of hate turned anatomical, the way a knife looks when it precisely carves dermis from muscle. Halfway, the efforts of his face are washed away like make-up in rain, but still he trudges on, insistent and emotionless, as my motions weaken, my focus pinpointing down to sucking in harsh and staggering air that there is suddenly not enough of.

He finishes his story, and I grunt, almost shamefully at the rush the testimony gives me, an itch in my chest being satisfied, but then he rolls into another story without stopping, and my back is scratched and gouged by the chapped brickwork, by the force of his hold, every motion raking the skin there as something inside me stretches uncomfortably, bloats into a nausea.

He recites his statement of a scarecrow king stuffed with panic-crushed birds, and I try, I do, I try and push back at his shoulders, my apologises near identical to my pleading for him to stop, but the skin there collapses in like paper mache and my hands are gulped in by the pulpy, sweaty mess of him. I give a choked gargling scream, and still he drones on, his eyes never shifting from mine.

His final statement is too much. It's a short missive, on something like love or something like ownership; a story about a indecisive man who cherishes a greedy jealous lover, a man who is tempted by wanderlust promises to leave for familiar shores, the plucky resolve of his lover who finds terminal ways to keep him grounded.

“Aren't you so lucky,” the man tonelessly performs the voice of the lover, crooning as they nail feet to pavement, the indecisive man sobbing out his sorries and promises to repent, “aren't you so lucky to be so loved, and oh I do love you so my dear.”

The weight of the story, but it's not a story, not really, it's a parable, it's an allegory, a fable, a threat, it hurts. Like when you pick at a fingernail but find it rips too deep, the nerves exposed to the bite of the air. I retch and move to double over, but the man with his face all gone and his eyes the colour of the city, he crowds me, keeps me standing, relentlessly intones with unblinking eyes.

I don't know when he stops, point made, message delivered. At some point, I think Martin comes to carry me home.

* * *

The next time I hear the yellow door banging, the unrelenting commitment of the shape behind the glass, I ignore it. I don't run after it. I clutch my bag to me and count out loud to ten, my voice trembling, until it stops and the door disappears again.

I am trying so hard to ignore a lot of things.

Martin frets over my dim, cloud-covered mood. He talks about taking time off, _maybe you could go and talk to someone, we could make an appointment, I really think it could do you some good._

I have seen David's face after he's spoken to his therapist. I politely decline.

Martin worries, but it's a coddling, cushioning over-stuffed kindness; he makes me cup after cup of tea, strokes my hair when I find myself yo-yoing from fine to distraught, knows to avoid me when my temper curdles furious. He even talks about going on holiday together, _a break Jon, you work too hard, we could go somewhere, get out of the city for a while._

I don't correct him.  
  


* * *

My name is Jonathan Sims, and I am in Eskew, and there's something terribly broken in this city.

* * *

It is months after that my courage returns, my resolve meekly slinking out from its cobwebbed hiding place.

“How long have we been here?” I say, aiming at a mild, thoughtless levity. We're in bed, and Martin's peering over blocky reading glasses at a slim tome, easily following the cuneiform marks of written Eskovian. He says it's poetry, that it's evocative and romantic and charming, offered to read me some, but I said I'd listen another time.

I don't like the poetry they write here. It's too vague and too vicious.

“Always with the questions,” Martin glances at me indulgently, and it pulls at the scar tissue that scores from his left ear tracing under his chin, before he dog-ears the page he's reading, like I'm being gifted his attention.

“That's not an answer,” I retort back, clamping down on the topic, not willing to be so easily moved, but Martin's expression doesn't let up from its softness.

I never see him angry, not at me, not at this city; I never see him sad any more, never witness him cry over poetry, a sad story, something lost. I don't see him anything other than smiling.

“What answer do you want then, Jon?”

“The truth.”

“And what would you do with the truth, Jon?”

I am cold in bed, despite the cloying squeeze of the blankets. Martin leans in, and I don't know why, but my body flinches back against the headboard. Martin doesn't seem to notice. He strokes my face with a broad, scarred palm. Our air mingles, matted together in the closeness of the room.

“Always with the questions,” he repeats fondly. “You don't need to, Jon. We're happy aren't we? The city feeds you and keeps you protected. Why do you need to question what we have here?”

“I...” I start, but he continues. His hand has not let go of my face.

“Life's good here,” he says. “You're happy, aren't you, Jon? I want you to be happy.”

“I'm happy,” I say mechanically, dutifully, like he wants me to. I wish he didn't repeat my name so much, like he'll forget it if it falls out of use. “I'm just... things here, there's something about this city...”

“You're confused,” Martin says, and his thumb rubs over the pockmarks of scars over my cheeks. “That's ok, that's understandable. You've always asked questions, haven't you, Jon, though you so rarely got the answers you wanted. A lonely child with too many questions in his mouth, grown up into an adult with the same inclinations.”

“That's not – ”

“Just be here, hmm? Be with me. We could be happy here, if you didn't ask so many questions.”

I want to be good for him. He loves me, and my bones remember that I love him.

* * *

Over a pint, I whisper-repeat my question to David. His eyes bulge and twitch like a prey animal, like something small and trembling in an undergrowth.

“Stop, Jon,” he replies, but I can't, I can't – there's the thick draping pall of something missing in my head, and I am so tired and my dreams are of a greedy, spiralling city that grows wider and fatter and more wanting, and I am sharing a bed with a man who won't stop smiling, that I love, that I am both frightened of hurting and frightened of.

“ _ **How long have you been here**_ _?”_ I ask, and there's something tar-thick, staticky, claggy like honey in my mouth and my words are More somehow, and David's mouth flaps and he jerks as though he's caught with fish wire.

“I was brought here,” he says, even as his eyes look at me in horror. “I couldn't paper over the cracks in the world, and my mother couldn't forgive me and one night I ran into the rain. I wanted to get lost and so it embraced me, and now I can't leave, and I've tried, Jon, and it'll get you nowhere, I've tried but it'll take everything, more from you than you thought you could give – ”

That's as far as he gets before his eyes roll back in his head, and he smashes his head on the table on the way down, a glancing bruising blow that slices a ruler-straight line across his temple.

The chunks of words, of something true for once, sit satisfying in my stomach even as I roil at the sensation of it.

* * *

The city is furious.

It waits till I get home before it takes Martin from me. It is a vicious and cruel robbery. I am made to watch his unmaking this time.

Martin looks at me with tear-full eyes as he tears himself to pieces with his own rending bloody fingers.

“Why?” he sobs, as his flesh tears off like ripping paper. “Why, Jon? What did you do that for?”

He destroys himself remarkably efficiently.

After the city's tantrum – my bawling at the ribboning of his skin, the broken branches of his ribs and arms and legs, the flopping mask of his disconnected face, lips still asking why, why, why, flaps of mouthing skin on the living room carpet – I plead as I try and push him back together. It's like clay under my frantic palms, and Martin's lips won't stop accusing me, and it's my fault, I did this, I couldn't leave it alone.

I promise not to do it again. I promise to stay, I promise it can keep me just like it wants, just please give him back whole. 

It takes a long time, but eventually it returns all of him to me.

I stop asking my questions then. I am good. I meet with David after work and there is the inflamed bauble of our questions like poison in our throats, and we say nothing about the city or its inconstancies. I go to the job I don't understand in a city I can't explain and I return home to a man that loves me in the ways he can.

And Martin's smile is a bit wonkier these days, but he's mostly back. His face patchworked, rippled where they've sewn his pieces together. Handhold like a vice, gripping against me in bed like he's trying to squash me, mould us into a single body.

He tells me he loves me, and I reply in kind, and this, this at least isn't a lie.

And for a long time, maybe that gives me a sort of happiness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for body horror, graphic depictions of violence, and character death (of a sort)
> 
> Trigger warnings for the following:  
> * graphic, detailed violence and mutilation  
> * psychological torture  
> * strongly implied mental and emotional manipulation, controlling and possessive behaviour, memory alteration, gaslighting, and emotional abuse.  
> * what the BBFC might label a sense of 'sustained menace'.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon is given a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor content warnings in effect here, detailed below. We've finally reached the happy ending though!
> 
> Spoilers for episode 160.

“Jon! I'm home!”

I'm in the kitchen, back from work for a few hours now. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I'm peeling carrots with the intention of making dinner.

Martin calls out his cheery greeting from the front door, punctuated by the rustle of him taking off his damp coat, and I sound back with the sound of a hunting halloo to demonstrate my presence. I tip the lid of some boiling water, balance it on the rim so it doesn't bubble and froth over. I don't cook often – I am quietly excited to see the pleased look on Martin's face when he sees what I'm doing.

I tell him, with a fond cluck of demand, to take his shoes off before he comes in. I've hoovered, and I rather he didn't trek something horrible in.

But Martin doesn't come into the kitchen.

There is a slump, sudden, heavy, like someone dropping a shopping bag. On the window, the rain drums louder with the swell of a storm coming in.

“Martin?” I call out.

No response.

I go out into the hallway.

There's a woman standing there, kicking Martin's corpse to one side with distaste, his limbs lolling with the force. She stinks of grave soil and gun oil, and all I can think, for a petty, stunned, insensate moment, is that the blood's going to get in and ruin the carpet.

Behind her, my front door, unlocked – and next to it, like a drunken double-vision, is the closed yellow door.

Her face shifts into brazen relief when she sees me. A feral, wolfish shape to her mouth, showing too many teeth. She has a scar over her eyebrow, a jagged claw-marked thing, but she bears it like a trophy. She doesn't move entirely like a person does, an easy lope, but that is not uncommon in this city.

“Jon,” she breathes out, and there's something brash and pacified in her voice, brought down from a worry I've clearly been the cause of. “ _Finally._ ”

I am watching the blood snail-trail over Martin's doll-glass eyes. The way his skin shrinks and caves floppy, like an old balloon leaking air.

She steps forward. I take a step back.

“We're... we came for you, Jon.” she says, holding her hands up placatingly. She doesn't try and move towards me again. Her eyes flick over me, assessing – she doesn't seem surprised by the trophies of my own I bear on my face, throat, arms. She says my name kindly, comfortably, as if it's worn down with use in her mouth. 

Martin's skin sags loose and grotesque around his face, and I wonder what I did wrong now, what rule I broke, I was being _so good,_ I was trying so hard.

Daisy, I think. Her name is Daisy.

My head hurts. A headache building like a storm-front, prodding and pained.

I am reminded of something sharp at my throat, digging in and beading blood, fury and animalistic intent etched onto a face that now looks at me so tentatively.

“We?” I ask, because I only have questions now and it can do me no more harm to voice them. She gestures at the yellow door.

“The only way we could find you,” she says, still with that slow unfolding of words, as though she fears spooking me into bolting. “It was definitely the only way we could break into the city. It's something to do with the Powers, Basira thinks. Different strokes of the same brush and all that, grown stronger since Magnus' little fuck-up, least that's what Helen said. We could only get a hold for so long before the city shook us off, had to choose our moments, and even then it was touch-and-go. ” She makes a noise that might be a laugh in her throat, and it's rusty, like she's out of practise. “You've no idea how many doors we've opened to the wrong part of the city; I think Martin's trying down some corridor as we speak, poor bugger, wait till I tell him. ”

I do not understand. Martin's corpse is hardening on the carpet and I don't understand and my head hurts and I want it to stop for a minute.

It's almost relief, almost, when Martin walks through the front door again.

“I'm home!” he shouts out, putting down his backpack by the door, on top of his predecessor's. He draws up a toothy grin that dimples his scarred cheeks when he sees me in the hallway, faltering politely as he notices our guest. “Who's...?”

Daisy uses the knife in her fist to split the skin of his throat like shelling a nut. Martin makes a whimper like a punctured tyre, air hissing out wetly as he drops, hands clamping desperately to his throat. His eyes roll back in his head, the sound gargling through the rip in his vocal cords.

I have started shaking. I cannot do this, not again.

Daisy looks down at her newest Martin with dismissal.

“They made a pig's ear of him here,” she sneers, gives him a nudge with her foot. “Looks nothing like him. 's wrong with his face?”

“Can you just...?,” I say because it's something for my mouth to do. “I don't... Martin, you, oh god, you took him _again_ and it's going to be so angry...”

Daisy grabs my upper arm with her free hand, and I flinch bodily.

She looks momentarily hurt at that. It takes a moment before her face goes softer with understanding, a familial kindness.

“It's not real,” she says. Her voice is gentler than her grip. “This city, all of it, it's a weapon, it's a monstrosity of a lie wrapped in bricks and mortar, and since the whole end of the world thing, it only got stronger. It took you from us. You... well, after it happened, you weren't doing well. Wanted somewhere to get lost. I get that. And this place wanted so desperately to be seen.”

“This is...,” I say, and I'm scrabbling to keep up. I look at the framed photos in my hallway, pocked with gouts of blood, figurines and piles of books on the side table, loose change and spare batteries and the corpses of things wearing the face of the man I love like a balaclava. “I live here, this is my.... It's been _years – ”_

“No,” Daisy says, low, light with a rippling sorrow. “No, you haven't. It's this... it's this place. Time doesn't work well here. Or it doesn't follow the same rules. Remember.... d'you remember the coffin? There was no light and no sense of time, we couldn't move. It's like that, yeah, you just can't see it squeezing all the air out of you.”

I recall a crush of earth over my ribs, a grinding twist as the soil crumbled over my skin and down my throat. I remember holding Daisy's hand in the close and the dark.

“I can't leave,” I whisper. “It won't let me, it's my home now.”

“It can't be,” Daisy says briskly, and her eyes are sharp and possessive. I think if I moved away, she'd let me. That feels important, somehow. “It's too greedy for what it wants from you, and it'll take and take until you love it back. And you _have_ a home alright. You don't need this place. You've never needed it like it needs you.”

“I can't... I don't remember, I've...”

“You've people who love you,” Daisy says simply, carefully. She moves closer and I don't pull back. “People who care about you. Martin came to find us, to tell us you'd been stolen, and we've been looking, Jon, we haven't stopped. We want you to come home.”

“I'm home!” trills the shrill-bark voice of Martin coming in through the front door. His hair is different now, a copper-coloured weave, like someone's altered the colour settings on a computer game; he smiles at me, his lips making a parabola up his face, and his mouth folds back like flower petals. “You're home!”

He is taller than normal, bumps the ridging of his spine against the lintel.

Daisy growls and pounces.

Martin doesn't fight back. His lumbering, monstrous shape staggering, ill-footed. He looks at me, confused, as she rends a canyon-gap from sternum to stomach, gargles 'Jon?' like he's asking me for something, and I am horrified. My face is wet with something.

“You're home!” announces the next Martin, the colour of his skin lightened by three shades, his eyes speckling hazel, his hair long and fluffy. His hands don't fit the size of his body.

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” Daisy snarls, before she dispatches him like the last one.

“You're home,” tries the next Martin, with a shy, happy expression, less confident than the last, peeking round the door like he thinks he's encroaching my space, the blue eyes in his face glitching in size as though catching sight of something through a magnifying glass. The city has given him freckles, but too many, and they swarm his cheeks, devour the rest of the skin there.

The grotesque parade continues. Trying on skin tones and attitudes and facial features like clothes in a wardrobe, and Eskew is losing the basics with its eagerness; Martin's body does not always fit him.

“It's always going to be the wrong Martin, isn't it?” I ask Daisy dully. I am too exhausted at watching his murder to have much of a response any more. She's pinned a blocky featured, smooth-bodied model, a generic version not even moulded to affect some humanity, to the wall where we hung holiday photos; his mouth opens and closed in little beached gasps, that smile barely wavering.

“It's trying to mimic someone from your memory,” Daisy says as she skewers her knife through the fleshy-material that serves as skin. “It's not good at people.”

The not-Martin shape exhales a rattling hiss of air, and Daisy steps back.

“We should go while it makes another one,” she says, wiping his blood off her cheek, and holds out a hand.

I don't take it.

“We're running out of time,” she says, trying to quash her irritation, and I step back, away from her, away from the door, and the surreal black-comedy pile of dead Martins in the hallway.

“They hurt him,” I say. “I-I tried to leave, I did, I saw the door and I wanted.... I wanted to. When I... when I asked too many questions, they hurt me, and then when that didn't work, the city took him and tore him apart and sent him back wrong, I-I can't do this to him, I can't go through this again. Please.”

“He's not real,” Daisy replies calmly. “He's a stick that they can beat you with, nothing more, look at it, it's not even a person, it's a moulded bastardisation of what it thinks you want, what it wants you to see.”

“I...”

Daisy sheaths her damp, sullied blade. She holds out her hand to me, and I find myself taking it. Her skin is calloused, scabbed with blood and scratches, warm.

“I know it's hard to believe. But right now, Jon, right now, there's another Martin through this door, and he's been frantic, and scared senseless and frankly incredibly annoying, but he hasn't stopped looking, not for a minute, he hasn't stopped trying to get you free. None of us have. This Martin, this caricature of him, he'll be nothing but the death of you.”

She could be another trap. Another twisting game. They could do worse things to me than take Martin again.

“Why have you tried so hard to find me?” I breathe out.

“This isn't your home.”

“Why did I leave then? If things were... were so good out there, then why did I come to Eskew?”

“The world ended,” Daisy says, and that puts a pin through my growing frustration. “Someone... you were betrayed, Jon. Used to do things you didn't want to. Hurt. The city likes broken things. It likes being needed by people who feel they've nothing else. So it took you.”

“If I... If I leave,” and even now I whisper that sentence as though it could still cause me harm. “Will it be easier?”

Daisy gives me the truth, and I am grateful.

“The world isn't... I can't promise it's better. It's not safe. There's a lot wrong and we don't know how much we can fix. But it's real. Every moment of it.”

“And... Martin? Will he... is he...?”

“He's the realest thing I know.”

Daisy smiles and it's not like Martin's smiles have been, face-deep and encoded into his skin, their consistency insincere. It's wide and full of teeth and honest.

“ _ **Jon,**_ ” says the bird-croak hum of the Not Martin that comes through my front door. There are spires pushing through the roof of his mouth like stalagmites, his skin crackling. He smells of sweet apples and petrichor, and his hair is the colour of tarmac, of a city-scape. His face has forgotten how to be a face. “ _ **Stay, Jon.**_ ”

“No,” I say shakily, to Martin, to the city, and Daisy's hand is so so solid in mine, and for the first time in so long, I allow myself to want more than this place, this city, this bird-cage of an existence. “No, I-I want. I want to go home.”

The scraggy shape lurches forward.

Something that might be an arm, or a leg, or a tentacle or a spike pokes out of the yellow door. Its appendages strike out – almost similar to fingers but stretched and over-long, like they've been smashed and pulled out like toffee – and puncture into the body of the crumbling Martin, right through his mouth and out the back of his throat. He gags and keens and deflates, stops moving.

A head pokes out of the door to follow. It warps like the yellow wood, fractals its features with something that reflects the concept of a smile. Looking at it makes me dizzy.

“Little Archivist,” it says. It's words loop and echo back on themselves. “Time to leave the spiralling city.”

“There's a man...” I say, trying to rouse up what I want to say. “Here. He got – He got lost too.”

“David Ward will find his own way out,” the crooked, circling face replies cryptically. It is wearing a professional business suit over a shape that cannot possibly be a body. “He'll find what grows in the cracks of him.”

I do not understand, but I am used to this by now. Blood is staining the soles of my shoes, and the rain outside is subsiding somewhat.

I want so very badly to see home. To remember and recall what has been taken from me.

To see Martin, my Martin again.

“Let's go, hm?” Daisy says. Her rough hand is steady in mine.

I nod and we go through the yellow door together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for:  
>  * detailed descriptions of murder, and graphic violence. 
> 
> Thanks for reading this odd little passion project / crossover. Listen to _I Am In Eskew_ if you've not given it a try yet, and feel free to say hi over on Tumblr (or send jonmartin prompts, I'm always happy to get them :D)


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